


whatever was, still is (says a song tied to a tree)

by walkingsaladshooter



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (Mildly? Maybe?), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Death, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Logic, Fix-It of Sorts, Happy Ending, Non-Gory Descriptions of Bodily Decay, Resurrection, gardener rey, love saves the day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27032677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingsaladshooter/pseuds/walkingsaladshooter
Summary: Rey knows fairytales. She knows the kiss gives life, not takes it. Something went wrong. Someone didn’t play by the rules.So, standing in her garden in the middle of the night, she decides to get him back.
Relationships: Ben Solo - Relationship, Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 15
Kudos: 87
Collections: To Rapture the Earth and the Seas: the 2020 Reylo Fanfiction Anthology





	whatever was, still is (says a song tied to a tree)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Theodore Roethke's "Words for the Wind" because god help me I cannot stop titling Reylo fics from the man's poems. The moodboard below was made by the lovely RFFA mods <3 Big thanks to Vaoni, crossing_winter, and aionimica for the beta-reads!
> 
> This isn't quite a fix-it fic, since it's an AU, but it's very much a Reylo happily-ever-after ending, and I hope it soothes in a fix-it fashion.
> 
> This fic does get a little funky with the actual physical process of decay and bodily decomposition. I’m not sure how to tag “there will be descriptions of what happens to a human body after death” in a tidy way (though I tried, lol), but that is a piece of this. I know that's not everyone's jam and specifically that some folks might really not want to think about that as regards Ben, so just a heads-up. But as someone who's not a fan of gore or body horror, I tend to not get too too graphic with these things.
> 
> Thank you for reading. <3

  


There’s a bee-buzzing, heavy-sweet golden quality to late summer that always makes Rey feel particularly alive. All the greenery is at its peak lushness, full and glowing, pushing its last hurrah as far as possible before roots start growing colder and everything begins turning gold and orange and brown. The air is humming, oversaturated with sun-warmed grass and rioting flowers. And the garden is in its most glorious tangle.

Sweat runs down between her shoulders as she weeds around the peppers and eggplant. It’s been a good season for the peppers. They’ve loved how much sunshine there’s been.

Rey doesn’t always use tools when she weeds. Sometimes, like now, she wriggles her fingers down into the earth and coaxes up the roots. Dirt on her hands, and smudged on her brow after she wipes away sweat with the inside of her wrist, makes her feel grounded. Stable. Secure.

After a lifetime of chasing stable and secure, she’s learned to take every scrap of it she can. Even if it’s just dirt under her fingernails as she pulls up weeds.

She sits back on her heels. Her chest feels tight, even with the earth on her hands. It feels tight too often these days.

Something’s got to break.

She’s washing her hands when Ben’s face appears in her mind. He’s been there, hanging in the background, all day long. Working in the garden was supposed to distract her. It was supposed to keep the memories—the limpness of his once-strong arms, the way his head lolled back when she rolled him in, baring his throat, no beating pulse beneath the skin—at bay.

Rey shudders and turns off the tap. Her eyes sting hot.

So she does what she does best when everything hurts too much to bear: she acts like nothing’s wrong at all.

Her cottage gathers dust quickly. She’s decided this is because it’s so old, though she doesn’t know if that’s true. But either way, she has to clean often. Rey doesn’t mind—it’s good to have purposeful work to do, to keep her body in motion.

It was barely more than a shack when she bought it for a song. A kitchen, a bathroom, a cramped closet of a bedroom, and a stooped-ceilinged attic that smelled of mushrooms when it rained. It was a mess, but it was hers. A little fairytale sort of cottage, the reward for the bright-eyed young orphan who had traveled so far and worked so hard.

Rey spent months salvaging materials, scavenging scrap and supplies from yard sales and roadside dumps. She built out the bedroom and added a sun porch off the kitchen and cleaned the whole thing up, spiffed it up to flush edges and whitewash and crisp blue curtains.

Her cottage, her garden—the fruits of her years of struggle. Finally a place she can truly call home, and hers. It’s all she needs.

Or at least it was.

Rey cleans the cottage top to bottom until she’s tired and everything is gleaming. She showers, letting the lukewarm water wash away dirt and sweat and worry. She makes a sandwich and brews some coffee—just enough for one cup—and sits at her tiny kitchen table with the back door open so she can watch the fireflies start to wink into sight as night falls.

And finally, in the stillness of late evening and the calm of the cooler breezes starting to blow, she lets her guard fall.

  
  
  
  


_ Perhaps the oddest thing about the man—besides his height and broadness, his features that dance between soft and stony—is that he doesn’t so much as flinch when Rey brandishes her ax. _

_ “This is private property,” she growls. _

_ The man doesn’t try to appease or to aggress her. He just stands there in the moonlight, tilts his head the smallest bit, and regards her with his heavy, dark gaze. “You live out here alone?” _

_ “Yes, which means nobody will hear you scream if you try anything and I have to kill you.” _

_ “You’re skittish.” _

_ “You’re the one lurking in my garden in the middle of the night.” _

_ His brow furrows. “There are worse things than me in these woods.” _

_ The woods in question huddle close to the back edges of Rey’s garden, past the blackberry bushes with their thorny tangles. “I’m not stupid enough to mess with the bears and coyotes.” _

_ “Oh.” The man’s mouth softens. “You really don’t know.” _

_ And Rey couldn’t say why that breaks her guard. She couldn’t say why that softness in his mouth, the gentleness that flits across his eyes, softens her, too. But she lowers the ax slowly and asks him, “Know what?” _

  
  
  
  


Rey never visited Ben’s grave. It wasn’t a conscious decision, exactly, but it’s been nearly three months to the day, and she’s never gone, not once. She doesn’t have to. Ben is with her whether she goes to visit his remains or not.

Besides, she knows she didn’t bury him that deeply. She isn’t sure she wants to see what his grave looks like now.

Which isn’t to say she doesn’t go into the woods at all.

They feel clear, now, after his death. The things that haunted the trees, the things he warned her against when they first met, feel gone now. Nothing has tried to hurt Rey again, anyway.

She nonetheless carries her ax as she walks the woods in the middle of the night. There are still coyotes and bears to contend with. She’d rather stay out of their way, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Rey climbs the hill half a mile behind her cottage, weaving between trees, until she breaks the tree line and comes out on top of the hill under the wheeling dome of clear sky. There are a million stars and a bright half-slice of moon. She gasps in full breaths of warm air and blinks her eyes hard against a sudden dampness.

She can feel him here. She can always feel him here.

Rey lies down in the grass, looks up at the sky, and lets her breathing slow back to natural and easy.

This hill is the most magical place in the forest. She’s thought that since she moved here. Like a fairytale place, to match her cottage. She could be The Orphan on Top of the Hill, lying here under the stars. It’s more of a princess thing, perhaps, to be enchanted to never leave the top of a hill. Probably until some prince wins her hand. But there’s nothing about Rey that suggests princess.

Half a pity, that. A princess is a good thing to be in a fairytale—you’ll probably turn out alright, as long as you’re not cruel or too selfish.

But then again, Rey is an orphan who struggled all her life to build something good for herself. And in a fairytale, that’s the next best thing to be.

It helps, sometimes, to frame her own story like a fairytale. They were what gave her hope all through her childhood. She can’t remember where she got the book, a little cloth-bound thing with yellowed pages, but she never left it behind no matter how many times she was shuffled around.

The heroes of the stories in its pages were all good and kind, or sometimes just very clever. Rey supposes that was the point. You can choose to be good and kind, and that will reward you. And when life puts you in a corner, you can be clever and resourceful to find your way out. Both things have gotten her far.

But the thing all the heroes have in common, in Rey’s eyes, is that they never give up.

And Rey is nothing if not stubborn.

  
  
  
  


_ “Do you know the story of The Snow Queen?” _

_ Ben watches her from the other side of the clearing. She can see every star, up here on the hilltop. She can see them glittering in his eyes. _

_ “It reminds me of you.” _

_ “How so?” _

_ She has her ax tonight, like she always does when she walks the woods in the dark. But it’s in her belt, not in her hand. Still, she keeps her distance. “I don’t think you’re really cruel,” she says. “I think you’ve just gotten a splinter in your heart.” _

_ “You’re talking in riddles.” _

_ “I’m talking in fairytales.” Rey’s heart is beating quick. “I know you, Ben.” _

_ He doesn’t answer, but she can feel his reaction. She doesn’t know how she can, but she can always feel him. He’s—hesitant. Disbelieving. _

_ “I know you,” she repeats. _

_ “You know we’ve never met before I came to your garden.” There’s a softness, a hush, to his voice that’s more suited to a lover’s embrace than their strange stalemate. It makes Rey shiver. _

_ “Some part of us must have.” _

_ “Do you believe that?” _

_ She feels like she could burst out of her skin. Like she’ll lose herself if she doesn’t cross the clearing and pull him close. But she’s scared she’ll lose herself if she does. She knows, now, the things he’s done. That the evil that followed him to these woods was once his master, and he its right hand. _

_ She can’t give in. Not yet. _

_ “If not, then tell me why we have—this.” _

_ He doesn’t answer. She knows he can’t. _

  
  
  
  


It’s been three months since Ben died, since he saved her, since she buried him. After he died, Rey started reading about the stages of death and decomposition, more often than not struggling to read through the blur of tears in her eyes and the sick ache that never left her chest and the empty, echoing space in her head and heart that was where he was supposed to be. But she wanted to know.

The first day after she buried him, she didn’t get out of bed. She lay there, heavy and still. Two miles into the woods, beneath the dirt, Ben’s body lay, heavier and stiller. Rey sank deeper into her mattress, settling; Ben’s blood sank to the downward planes of his body, settling. It would look like bruises, if Rey could see it.

Everything she felt—the things she always tried to push away and compartmentalize—pushed up inside her. It was a pressure, rising under her skin, rising in her throat, shoving her after that first heavy day into a restlessness, a need to work the feelings out of her body.

Pressure grew in Ben’s body, too, rising under his skin. Microbes multiplied, found plenty to eat: gave off lactic acid, methane, ammonia.

Tears escaped from Rey’s eyes no matter how viciously she weeded the carrot patch, no matter how hard she scrubbed the bathtub, no matter how long she hiked and how much she sweated. She tried as hard as she could not to think about what escaped from Ben’s body as the decay took him over.

It haunted her, for a while, knowing the things that were happening to what had once been the man she came to love.

But slowly, something turned in her heart.

It was the worms, she thinks, that saved her. Wrist-deep in the soil of her garden, slugs and bugs and worms have never been strangers to her. And then, in the many weeks following Ben’s death, she found something like solace in the little decomposers, and in the carbon cycle.

Because first there is carbon and nitrogen. Simple building blocks, delicious food for her plants: carbon dioxide and nitrate ions. Her green leafy friends convert these into food, in turn creating their own, more complex nutrients.

Someday an animal eats the plant, passing along these molecules, creating an intricate dance of microbes and nutrients and blood and breath and vivid, teeming life.

And then the animal dies, and these new, complex molecules fall apart through decay. The bloat, the offgassing, the eventual liquefaction of tissue—all heralds of these molecules being taken in by decomposers, whether bacteria or worms or any other little nibbling scavenger, and transforming them back into their basic building blocks.

Carbon. Nitrogen.

And the plants feed again.

And so the worms saved Rey as she watched the cycle happen in her garden, as she buried dead scraps of failed plants between rows, as she witnessed death giving way to new growth.

Something comes from decay. Something grows from it.

And that’s enough to hope on.

  
  
  
  


_ It’s cool and misty and perfect late-spring early morning when Ben cuts through the pale sunlight and stops just short of Rey’s door. “You’re not safe,” he urges. “Please. Come with me.” _

_ She shakes her head, gripping the doorframe. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my house. My patch of land.” _

_ “He’s going to—” _

_ “Do you have any idea?” she seethes. She can’t help but seethe—this fact is always a shard of glass in her heart. “Any idea how hard I had to work to get to this point? How long? What I had to suffer to make it here? Nothing is taking this away from me. And I’m not going to run.” _

_ His nostrils flare. His eyes burn. His hand twitches at his side and she thinks for a wild moment he’s going to grab her chin, or kiss her, or maybe both. But instead desperation plays at the corners of his mouth and he pleads, “You have to stay safe. If he finds you—” _

_ “Why does he even care?” Her voice comes out rough. “I’m no one.” _

_ “Not to me.” If her voice is rough, his is thick with feeling. “And that’s why he wants you dead.” _

_ Rey swallows. She can’t look away from Ben’s eyes. In the morning sunlight, they’re almost honey-colored. “You’re a strange man, Ben Solo,” she says. Like something out of a fairytale, she doesn’t say, because he will want her to be more realistic. But he is. More than any of her childish pretendings, Ben is her fairytale. A man in black, looming on her back doorstep at dawn, begging her to flee the woods, the deep and dangerous woods. A man whose heart seems to reach out to hers, like there’s a silver thread connecting them. A man whose feelings she can feel, too, nearly as clearly as her own. _

_ Nothing has made sense since he first appeared in her garden. But he makes her feel more alive than anything ever has. _

_ Carefully, she reaches across the threshold, her eyes never leaving his, until her fingertips brush his own. _

_ It doesn’t surprise her when Ben starts to cry. After all, she’s already crying. _

  
  
  
  


Rey has a theory: she’s met Ben Solo before. Not in this life, but in another. Another time, or another dimension. She’s met him before, loved him before, and lost him before.

She’s always lost him, she thinks. That’s the only way she can explain why, when he died, it felt so familiar. Like an old bruise she can’t stop pressing, thrumming a tired ache under her skin. It feels inevitable. There is no echo, no old bruise, of getting him back.

What the other versions of her were like, she can’t say. But Rey knows one thing: this version of her knows fairytales.

The Orphan on Top of the Hill sits up in the grass, staring off into the depths of the trees. The moon has moved across the sky and the songs of the crickets and tree frogs have shifted.

Rey gets up. Ax in hand, she walks back down the hill.

Through the woods, past the blackberry bushes, into her garden. The leaves of all the plants look silvery in the moon and starlight.

The thing about fairytales is that they give permission to be complicated. Sometimes you’re the good brother; sometimes, the cruel brother. Sometimes you’re the kind princess, and other times you’re the evil witch. Hell, sometimes Rey wants to be the shady old wise-woman in the forest who’s kind of both.

People can be both. And they can choose to be better. And in the end, Ben chose.

The thing is, he died to save Rey. The thing is, she should have died, bleeding from her gut and head before Ben killed his mentor and saved them both—but she didn’t. The thing is, she swears the first warmth that pulled her back to consciousness was his lips on hers. But he was gone before she could be sure.

Rey knows fairytales. She knows the kiss gives life, not takes it. Something went wrong. Someone didn’t play by the rules.

So, standing in her garden in the middle of the night, she decides to get him back.

  
  
  
  


_ Rey reaches into her bag and pulls out two apples. _

_ Ben raises an eyebrow as she holds one out to him. “Really.” _

_ “Really. All you do is skulk around these woods. You’re going to starve.” _

_ “I’m not going to starve.” _

_ “Eat the damn apple, Ben.” _

_ They sit in silence on top of the hill, crunching through crisp red-orange skin into sweet-tart white flesh. Rey eats her whole apple, core and all, and spits the seeds into her hand. Ben watches her. _

_ “Why don’t you just leave?” she finally asks. _

_ He sighs. He’s only eaten half his apple. “It’s not that simple.” _

_ “It’s exactly that simple.” _

_ “That doesn’t make it easy.” _

_ “Good things seldom are, in my experience.” Rey stands up. She’s buzzing under her skin, with her own restlessness that wants to lean into him, with his twist of guilt and shame and fear. “You’re all in my—in my chest again.” _

_ “It can’t be helped.” _

_ Rey strides down the hill, her fist closed around the apple seeds. “It isn’t fair.” She stops, half turns back towards him. “You know that? To feel like this and have to keep telling myself no.” _

_ Something like a smile touches his soft mouth. “You’re nothing if not strong, Rey. And stubborn.” _

_ “I know.” But it doesn’t feel like a victory. _

  
  
  
  


It feels good, knowing what she’s going to do. Having steps to follow. Having things to do. She’s never much liked just sitting with her feelings, and she’s done entirely too much of that since Ben died.

Inside the cottage, she doesn’t turn on any lights. Her curtains are open and her windows are plentiful, and she can see by the moonlight well enough. She goes to the kitchen sink, to the window above it, to the little cup tucked into the corner of the sill.

At the bottom of the cup are the apple seeds. She’d carried them home in her fist, not sure why beyond knowing she wanted some piece of Ben, of this thing between them, that she could hold and see and prove. Often, sitting at her tiny kitchen table—the one she so often imagined him sitting at with her, so often wanted to set two cups of coffee on, but never had the chance—she’d hold the seeds in her hand, rubbing her thumb across them, and think of him. At first it was only every so often, the pain too fresh and raw. Then, over time, it became a near-daily ritual.

After a while, she could swear when she was near that window, washing dishes or making coffee, she could feel his presence whispering from the cup.

She plucks out one single seed and tucks it into her pocket.

Her watering can, filled from the reservoir of rainwater she built and installed on the corner of the cottage. The apple seed in her pocket. And, from where it’s lain wadded up and untouched under her dresser, where she kicked it after stripping it off with shaking hands, the torn and blood-soaked tank top she wore the night she died. Or should have died. The night Ben died, and she buried him, and she walked home alone.

Every day until now, if she even thought of the shirt, it was like a poison. Like if she touched it she’d die again.

Tonight, something in her heart has turned. She grabs the shirt without flinching and carries it out the back door.

The woods have slipped deeper into liminality as the night creeps further and further past midnight. Rey walks, ax in one hand, watering can and shirt in the other, apple seed in her pocket. Her chin is level, her gaze and her stride steady, as the night weaves around her the further in she goes.

Half a mile. An owl calls. Something skitters through the underbrush. Her heart beats steady.

A mile. Something bigger, something nearly the size of her, shifts somewhere off in the trees. A deer, or a coyote. But it doesn’t come near her, and Rey keeps walking.

A mile and a half. She remembers Ben’s fingers twining through her own as they cried. The resolve in his eyes when he’d found her under that tree, fighting for her life against his mentor, his persecutor, his abuser, who had found her after all, just as he’d warned her. The way he’d so tenderly brushed her hair back from her face as he held her in his arms.

Two miles.

She sees the tree.

  
  
  
  


_ It’s sweet of him to look so concerned, Rey thinks as her vision starts to tunnel. She’s not stupid. She knows she’s dying. She’s scared. But it’s sweet, still, that Ben seems to not want her to die. _

_ He’s telling her something she can’t hear. She can feel his hand over the wound in her belly. Too late, Ben, she thinks, because she can’t speak now. Way, way too late. _

_ Still. _

_ Everything goes gray and hazy. _

_ Still. It’s sweet. _

_ Still— _

  
  
  
  


The earth over Ben’s grave has slumped down, collapsing in on itself, likely as Ben’s body lost its mass. She can tell, even in the pale dappled moonlight, that the dirt there is looser, less compacted than the soil in the rest of the forest floor.

Rey takes a deep breath and kneels next to the grave.

Not too far below the surface lie his remains. There’s no putrid smell. That’s good, at least. Burying him so shallow maybe wasn’t wise, but maybe more air got to his body—helped it decompose faster.

It doesn’t occur to her to say anything. What would she say? What words could she possibly pluck and weave together to even begin to touch the immensity of what he did for her, the depths of her heart in which he’s taken up home?

So she just feels him.

Rey spreads her fingers and presses her palm against the dirt. It’s cool, this deep in the night.

She pushes her fingers into the soil.

It’s loose and soft. Her hand slides in easily.

The shirt is stained with her own blood, her life blood, and her sweat and her tears. Literal, physical parts of her, let alone how much of her heart has gotten tangled up in it. The apple seed is full of him, the echo of his feelings in her own chest, the way his eyes always shone with feeling no matter how stony his face was.

Rey folds the shirt carefully around the seed.

There’s no logical reason to think this will work. But nothing about Ben, about his presence in her life, has ever been logical.

He’s her fairytale lover. He saved her with a kiss.

She’ll save him with this.

Rey plunges her hand, holding the seed wrapped in the shirt, deep into the earth, nearly to the shoulder, and buries it where Ben’s heart used to be.

Something solid scrapes her wrist. Something softer that isn’t dirt brushes the back of her hand. She doesn’t linger. She pulls her hand out, smooths the dirt back in place over the grave. Her heart is beating fast and her breath is a little short, but her hands stay steady, and her eyes stay dry as she gently waters the soil.

Finally, she whispers.

“Come back, Ben.”

  
  
  
  


_ “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. We don’t have to be alone.” _

_ Rey thinks of her little kitchen table. Of the two chairs. _

_ “Not unless we both choose it.” _

  
  
  
  


Rey is a gardener, if a self-taught one. She knows how planting works, and she knows, by all reasonable laws of nature, she buried the apple seed too deeply to sprout.

She still goes back out to Ben’s grave the next afternoon to water it again.

It certainly doesn’t need daily watering, if it’s buried that deep. But again, she isn’t playing by the rules of logic and nature. She’s playing by the rules Ben’s presence in her life has always played by. She’s playing by the rules of the princess who pricked her fingers on nettle until they bled and saved her brothers with shirts she wove. She’s playing by the rules of the girl who never gave up, whose tears melted the ice in the heart of her dearest friend and brought him back to her.

When she steps in sight of his grave, her breath catches.

Rey hurries over and kneels, unable to stop the smile that blooms on her face. There, right above where Ben’s heart used to be, is a tiny green sprout.

She waters it. She thinks of his hands, his eyes, his voice. She thinks of the ghost of memory of his lips on hers.

Again, she says, this time just above a whisper: “Come back, Ben.”

She returns again the next day with no idea what to expect. The afternoon is hot, the air heavy and full of the smells of leaves and dirt and wildflowers, and the sunlight shifts in dapples over her shoulders as she walks the two miles below the trees, carrying her watering can.

This time, her heart starts to pound when Ben’s grave comes into view. Yesterday’s little sprout has grown as high as her knees, whisper-thin branches beginning to furl out, tiny leaf buds at the tips.

Rey learned a long time ago not to question a good thing. So she waters the tiny sapling and says again, “Come back, Ben.”

Every day she goes back, and every day the sapling is taller. On the third day, it reaches her hips. On the fourth, her chest. On the fifth, it’s as tall as she is, the bark still smooth and young.

She spends her days otherwise in the garden, wrist-deep in the earth, harvesting peppers and tomatoes and green beans, pruning the basil, talking to the bees, until her body aches and her mind is clear. It’s so different from three months ago, when she worked the garden with a sort of slow desperation, silently begging it to heal her.

She never did heal, exactly. But the thing in her that died along with Ben went through its own decay, until that moment when the worms reminded her that nothing is ever gone, just changed.

On the sixth day, the tree is overhead.

It’s thin for its height, maybe because it’s growing so near another tree, the one she buried Ben beneath. But its branches are full and bushy with leaves, its bark beginning to scale and flake. The air is full of the scent of the delicate white blossoms. Rey’s chest feels full not but heavy, and a smile plays easily at the corners of her mouth.

She waters around the base of the tree, then rests her hand on the trunk. The texture of the bark grounds her, and she leans her forehead against it, too.

“Come back, Ben.”

  
  
  
  


_ She only hints that one time about her theory, the one where they’ve met before, in other lives or other worlds. Partly because she worries if she voices it, she’ll shatter something. And partly because whenever she thinks of it, it fills her with an instinctual sadness so heavy she can hardly bear it. _

_ Maybe if she doesn’t say anything, that sadness won’t come true. Maybe this time will be different. _

_ She’s good at hoping. But for all Ben’s eyes are always full of feeling, hope is the one thing she’s never seen in them. _

_ That’s okay. She can hope enough for them both. _

  
  
  
  


Rey knew from the moment she planted the apple seed in Ben’s heart that either the third day, or the seventh, or maybe the twelfth would be the important day. So on the seventh day, nervous energy buzzes under her skin as she walks through the woods back to his grave, to the apple tree growing there.

Where yesterday there were fresh, new blossoms, today there are fully-grown, beautifully ripe apples. Their skin gleams red-orange, and their scent nearly makes her dizzy.

“Ben,” she whispers. Something in her heart shifts.

She waters the base of the tree again, then rests her hand on the even patchier bark. “Come back, Ben,” she says, and this time her voice rings strong and clear.

A nudging in her heart, in the back of her mind. She steps back and holds out her hands so she catches the apple when it falls.

It’s not the most perfect apple on the tree. Not perfectly round, and the skin has a scar. But it’s gleaming and smells sweet and crisp.

Rey eats it, core and all. This time, she swallows the seeds.

When the sun sets, she showers off the day’s sweat and crawls into bed. Her window is open and she can see the growing moon, the stars dotting the sky. She can hear the crickets and tree frogs.

It’s been a long time since she fell asleep feeling this peaceful and this certain.

When she sleeps, she dreams, or rather it’s something more than a dream. Because she’s dreamed of Ben before in the months since he died, always twisting an ache in her heart.

This time, though, it doesn’t feel like a dream. There’s no smudged, uncertain quality to how things happen, or inconsistencies in his appearance, or dreamlike complexities and contradictions.

It’s just Ben, sitting beneath the apple tree. He looks up at her and smiles.

Rey has only seen him smile once, in that last moment before he died. She had made herself forget how much she misses it. It makes him look even more beautiful and impossibly young.

“Rey,” he says, and her heart rushes so full of feeling it startles her awake.

Her feet are on the floor before she knows what she’s doing.

Dawn is beginning to break when she goes out the back door and through the garden into the woods. She’d be running if it wasn’t two miles; as it is, she walks fast, heart beating strong and singing his name.

Two miles feels like nothing, this morning. And in the same way a dream can jump her from night to waking in a moment, she’s nearing the apple tree before she realizes how far she’s gone.

She doesn’t know how to describe the sound that escapes her when she sees a broad-shouldered figure dressed in black sitting beneath the apple tree, head tipped back against the trunk, eyes closed and chest rising and falling in the gentle breath of sleep.

Rey trips on her own feet when she runs to him, bruises her knees when she falls to them before him. Everything in her, every cell, every humming living bright piece of her is overflowing with feeling, spilling out in her trembling breath, her tear-blurred eyes, her smile stretching so wide it hurts her face. She takes his hands in hers and, for the last time, her voice thick, says, “Come back, Ben.”

His eyelids flutter. His lips part. He turns his head and furrows his brow and blinks, blinks again, blinks open his eyes. They’re warm and brown and for a scant moment confused. Then his gaze catches hers, and he takes in a sharp, shuddering breath.

“Rey,” he breathes out.

She nods, grinning like a fool, and takes his face in her hands and kisses him.

Whole and here and alive, blood singing under their skin, morning dew in his hair and his arms around her, so solid and strong and warm. His chest presses to hers and she feels his heart beating steady. And Rey laughs, laughs against his mouth, because she can’t help it, because never in her entire life has she felt so purely happy and whole as she does in this moment.

And Ben smiles, smiles, smiles at her, the brightest star in her sky.

  
  
  
She takes him home. She makes two cups of coffee. They sit together at her table, smiling at each other, as the morning blooms clear and beautiful around them.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. Don't be afraid to come say hi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nuanceismyjam), [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/nuanceismyjam), or [Tumblr](http://nuanceismyjam.tumblr.com/)! (Which I use in that order, in terms of frequency.)


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